"Leading IT consultants have warned the US military, government and "critical infrastructure agencies" that their widespread use of outsourced commercial software is putting the nation more at risk from a cyber terrorist attack.

Security experts at the Cyber Defense Agency (CDA) believe that central agencies as well as gas, electricity, telecoms and banking providers could fall foul to cyber terrorists who exploit the life-cycle weakness buried deep in the software code.

Life-cycle attacks occur when one line of code out of millions of such lines is rigged to open vulnerabilities within the software, thus exposing the software and the organisation to external threats, CDA stated."

"The chances of strategic damage from a cyber- terrorist attack on the United States increases the longer it takes the US military and critical infrastructures to remedy the risks posed with using outsourced software."

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